Patients share how changes in PSA levels or urinary symptoms led to their prostate cancer diagnoses, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to warning signs, not delaying medical evaluation, and seeking timely care. Their stories highlight how early action, second opinions, and trusted healthcare teams helped them navigate the uncertainty of a new diagnosis.
Craig Deatherage:
I was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago when I was working in Panama City, Florida. And my boss at the time was a former urologist who specialized in stage four prostate cancer. And when I called and said, "Look, boss, I just had a five-hour episode of peeing blood and startling. What can you tell me about that?" And he said, "Craig, don't even lift a gallon of milk.
I want you to go to an urgent care clinic tomorrow and get your prostate checked out and then I want you to get in with the local urology clinic and get checked out." So the process started there, but it didn't really start there because I had been ignoring symptoms for about a year. You ignore the incontinence, you ignore the urgency, the frequency. I felt like a five-year old sometimes running to the restroom and I had this sense of urgency that was just ridiculous.
I would go to the restroom and come back and my coworkers would say, "Craig, are you okay?" I said, "Yeah, I seem to need to pee more often now that I'm older." And they just accepted that. Nobody thought anything different of it. There were erectile dysfunction issues that I was ignoring because over 55, that's just naturally going to happen. And so you ignore all of the symptoms right up until you have a startling little thing that caused you to break out of your routine.
I really wasn't fond of going to doctors. So it took that kind of an episode to get me to go into an urgent care and then to get me to go into a urology clinic. They diagnosed me as stage four with mets. I was a Gleason five, four. For those of you who know what the Gleason numbers are, if you don't, it's easy to Google. Just look it up. And a five, four is a significant diagnosis for stage four cancer. And we had to start our journey there.
Philip Lavender:
I am Philip Lavender. My age is 68. I got diagnosed, believe it or not, April the 1st, 2014. And that's April Fool's Day as I tell everybody. In my particular case, I have a great primary care doctor and for about what, 10 years we were doing a PSA. Thing about people have to realize that you need to have a baseline. So they saw that baseline of mine had went from two point something to a little over four. And when it went over four, my primary care doctor said that we need to check this just to be sure. And I think I had just turned 60 and I'm saying, oh my gosh, what's going on now? He suggested I do another PSA that was elevated. So my neurologist, we did a biopsy. The biologic came back positive that I had stage one prostate cancer. And my PSA was at the time like 4.7.
That reality set in on me and I was just hearing the word C freaked me out in a sense because I didn't know what was going on. And I would diagnose stage one prostate cancer. So I immediately started doing some research. By the way, my wife is a registered RN, so she was able to consult me a lot about some of the things that we would do. Also, during this time also my oldest daughter was getting married that following month. So we had a lot of pressures going on with that. So with that, we went also to get a second opinion. I went up to Emory University and talked to some doctors up there and they made some diagnosis. Also said, "Yeah, it's real you have prostate cancer."
Jonathon Hall:
Then I went for a blood test, a straightforward blood test for a 59-year old just to make sure everything's in fine order. And I went away for a week on holiday. Funny enough to South of France. When I came back, I was given a call and they said to me, "Your PSA level's high." which I didn't know what I meant. And when it said high, I though, "Well, that's a good thing, isn't it?" And they said, "No, it's not. Your PSA level of seven is not good. It is a cancer test for prostate cancer. You have potentially got prostate cancer. We need to have you in to explore the scenario further." It's bizarre. You almost go into almost a filmic environment where it just doesn't seem real. I didn't feel bad. I'd had no symptoms that I'd heard of from other people who may have suffered from prostate cancer or whatever.
So I didn't really know what to feel. I was fit. I was running three times a week, swimming three times a week. There was nothing untoward in my life that seemed to indicate that there was something going on. And then suddenly I was confronted by the fact that I could have cancer. So the next step obviously was to face up, square up to this beast and deal with it. That's where the journey starts, isn't it? I went in to see a consultant whose surname was the same as mine, Hall. And we had a very nice chat in a hospital in Portsmouth in Southern England, which is one of the top prostate cancer hospitals in the UK, which is just happenstance, but thank God it was.
And I met him and a colleague of his and within about five minutes we went straight down to business and I was probed and they came back saying, "Well, there may be something going on. We'll have to check with that. So we're going to test you for that and then we're going to send you off for a series of scans." I was stuck in a tube and given a full scan, ultrasound scan to test, see where it was, whether it had moved anywhere else or anything like that. There are two things about this evaluation that strike me. One of which is the time it takes to get the results from that. And that is the biggest killer in all of this in the whole process is the time spent wondering what if or what if not, or just not wondering and wondering what's going on.